Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965

by Burleigh, Michael

  The hand of the CIA was at work in the population transfers, or Operation Passage to Freedom. The US Navy and the CIA’s Civil Air Transport, helped with the moving, while a Filipino charity provided doctors and nurses as part of a public health exercise for refugees, funded by the CIA front Operation Brotherhood. Mysterious rumours were circulated in the Communist North. One was that ‘the Blessed Virgin Mary is going south’; another that two divisions of Chinese troops had arrived in the North bent on rape and pillage, ramming chopsticks in people’s ears as a torture. When challenged about this last one, a smile invariably spread across Lansdale’s face. Eminent astrologers were co-opted into producing cheap almanacs, which predicted disasters set to befall Viet Minh leaders even as an era of prosperity blossomed in the South. Forged Viet Minh leaflets did the rounds. One told southern Viet Minh supporters to take warm clothing north, since they were about to work as volunteers on Chinese railways, and denied that it would be necessary to confine northbound passengers in ships’ holds because of likely enemy air or submarine attack. The effect of this denial on those contemplating taking passage in rusty Soviet freighters can readily be imagined.

  Meanwhile, in Hanoi, Conein recruited men who were removed to a training base on Saipan where they learned the blacker forms of warfare before being infiltrated back to North Vietnam. Lansdale smuggled some eight and a half tons of weapons into the North, where Conein’s favoured ruse was to smuggle coffins laden with grenades, rifles and explosives via fake funerals. Although the inserted teams of guerrillas had a comprehensive list of targets for sabotage, in the event they merely disabled Hanoi’s bus service with acids added to the engine oil, and the railways by mingling explosives disguised as bricks of coal into the stocks piled at Hanoi’s railway yards.

  Lansdale drew heavily on his Filipino contacts, after Magsaysay had sanctioned the Freedom Company, which was designed to share lessons from the war against the Huks. Since Diem rightly feared assassination, Napoleon Valeriano – who had headed the most notorious Skulls commando force fighting the Huks – was flown to Saigon to train presidential security guards. Lansdale personally dealt with negotiations with the leadership of the sects, each of which had its own armed militia, with a view to integrating the latter into the National Army. The simplest approach was to bribe the leaders from the fund of $10 million which Lansdale had at his disposal, invariably disguised as back-pay owed to their soldiers to save face.

  Diem successfully thinned out those who contested his regime’s power. A gun battle that destroyed an entire suburb of Saigon saw off the gangsters of the Binh Xuyen, whose vice lord Le Bay Vien fled to Paris. The Cao Dai pope left for Cambodia; the Hoa Hao leader known as ‘Ba-Cut’ (he had severed a finger when vowing to fight the French) was publicly guillotined.38 The prospect of a putsch against Diem by his own army’s Chief of Staff General Nguyen Van Hinh, who enjoyed support from the US embassy, was neutralized by flying key officers for a week of debauchery in Manila, and allowing the General to transfer into the departing French army. In this manner any threats to Diem from the armed sects or the army were neutralized. This increased his attractions to the Americans.

  At the same time, Lansdale was active with the Franco–US Training Relations Instruction Mission (TRIM), designed to modernize the Vietnamese National Army along the lines he had essayed in the Philippines. In addition to encouraging the army to undertake civil affairs programmes to improve their standing among the people, Lansdale flew select cadres to Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines to learn the rudiments of counter-insurgency warfare. Lansdale knew that the primary threat would come from Viet Minh guerrillas implanted in the South – whom Diem in a contraction of the Vietnamese for ‘Communist Traitors to Vietnam’ christened Viet Cong, a name which stuck. Their likely camps and operational areas were mapped and army communications improved, while Lansdale started recruiting Vietnamese rangers to patrol the jungle. He employed Communist Chinese military manuals to teach hearts-and-minds methods to sceptical South Vietnamese soldiers who preferred using rifle butts and boots on uncooperative farmers. Plays were organized involving a cast of Good and Bad Soldiers, Villagers, Guerrillas and a chicken, designed to illustrate the political ill-effects of soldiers’ stealing food from peasants.39

  Lansdale was also responsible for persuading Diem not simply to declare himself president, but to hold the referendum with the choice between himself and Bao Dai. Brother Nhu was invited not to stuff the ballot boxes with fake votes. In a largely illiterate country, Lansdale had the bright idea of making Diem’s ballot papers red – a colour signifying good fortune, while Bao Dai got green, a colour signifying a cuckold. In the event, Diem received 98 per cent of the vote, his 5.7 million eclipsing Bao Dai’s 63,000. In Saigon, Diem received a third more votes than the total number of registered electors. Lansdale deprecated such incompetence.

  With his brother elected president, Nhu established a pro-Diem caucus – the Can Lao or Revolutionary Personalist Labour Party – which was compulsory for all public servants. It was a cross between a political party, a religious order and the Gestapo, since those who refused to join were often tortured or murdered. Nhu drew on his French Catholic background for the Party’s creed of ‘personalism’, which would emphasize the dignity and value of the individual person as against Communist idolization of the masses. It was essentially the ideology of Vichy, with similar formations to integrate youth, women and so forth. Whenever the Nhus sought to explain it – and they could easily talk for eight hours without pause – their eager American auditors could not fathom their reactionary social views since these were so successfully obscured by theological mumbo-jumbo.

  The reality behind the fog was that Nhu had ten separate secret intelligence agencies, in an opaque structure that prevented him from knowing anything at all since each had an investment in thwarting the other and inventing intelligence.40 Lansdale was incensed about the Can Lao, knowing that it would result in all opposition to Diem going underground. He flew to Washington to persuade the Dulles brothers that he was right and the US embassy, which approved of the Can Lao, wrong: ‘I cannot truly sympathize with Americans who help promote a Fascistic state and then get angry when it doesn’t act like a democracy.’ Ordered to return to Saigon, Lansdale found that Diem had cooled towards him, chiefly because the touchy President felt a loss of face whenever the bold Filipino Magsaysay was held up as an exemplar.41

  Not only did Diem terrorize his opponents, but by excluding Buddhist leaders and professional people from its ranks the Can Lao virtually drove them into opposition. Worse, from 1956 onwards Diem did away with Vietnam’s venerable tradition of elected village leaders and replaced them with his own appointees, while doing very little to purge the central civil service of time servers inherited from the French. There was no prospect of land reform, given Diem’s close ties to the old landowning class. Instead Diem experimented with corralling villagers into agrovilles, failing to give them enough money to purchase any land, coercing them to undertake communal forced labour. Worst of all, this bastard imitation of the successful British tactics in Malaya breached the intense attachment the Vietnamese peasants felt for the graves of their ancestors. In 1959 Diem reintroduced the guillotine, which was used by mobile tribunals to rid the South of suspected Communists as well as criminals. Instead of softening their treatment of the peasantry, as Lansdale had recommended before he left Vietnam, Diem’s troops were known to deal with truculent farmers by cutting off their heads and playing football with them.42

  In North Vietnam Chinese advisers were helping the more militant Communists to carry out what was euphemistically called land reform. Peasants were encouraged to denounce their ‘feudal’ exploiters, who were humiliated or shot after kangaroo court hearings. By late 1956, several thousand people had been executed as ‘class enemies’, with estimated dead ranging from 3,000 to 15,000, depending on whether one counts victims of agrarian reform or people killed for other political
deviations. When these policies touched former members of the Viet Minh army, or Catholics in Ho Chi Minh’s home province, there was a popular backlash, which in the latter case required the intervention of an entire army division.

  There was also the problem of how to respond to the southern comrades who were reeling under the repressive measures taken by Diem and his security forces. Moscow’s enthusiasm for peaceful coexistence and the North’s desire to devote its energies to post-war reconstruction initially meant that restraint was urged on the southern Communists. The Soviets even sought admission of both Vietnamese states to the UN, a gambit which appalled Hanoi. The favoured slogan was ‘Build the North, look to the South’, although it should be stressed that there were plenty of militants (including Giap) who wanted to unify the country through renewed war. After the southern Party leader Le Duan became acting general secretary, this line was gradually modified over a period of years and in December 1956 the Central Committee in Hanoi sanctioned a limited campaign of terrorism against southern government officials. The new tactic simultaneously retaliated for Diem’s repressions while subverting any consolidation of a permanent southern state.

  The limited campaign by southern Communists was transformed into something larger during the Fifteenth Plenum of the Central Committee in January 1959. The number of assassinations in the South rose from 700 a year in 1958 to 2,500 two years later, and to 4,000 in 1961. Teams of southerners who had moved north in 1954 and had received extensive military training near Hanoi were infiltrated back into South Vietnam, where they assumed command of a major campaign of revolutionary violence. Others remained in Laos, converting rudimentary jungle tracks into the major supply route later known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail; the politically schooled devoted their energies to the newly formed National Liberation Front, so called to broaden the opposition’s base beyond Communists. The Viet Cong easily incited major peasant uprisings, especially in the Mekong Delta, where Diem had reimposed landowners who had fled when the French regime collapsed, while appointing his clients and cronies as provincial and village officials.

  The Eisenhower administration successfully propped up Diem for six years, in line with the strong-man strategy pursued elsewhere. To his immense credit, Ike refused to commit US troops to South Vietnam. But efforts to link US aid to nation-building reforms were a complete failure, and the hatred once felt for the French transferred readily to the Americans, who were disparaged as big clumsy people. The differences with the Philippines experience were fundamental. The Vietnamese were treated not as manly partners but as feckless dependants, and no effort was made to find a Vietnamese Magsaysay, if such a being existed in this altered context. The result was that Diem became indispensable, in the apt words of an American official ‘a puppet who pulled his own strings – and ours as well’. Diem’s solution to Communist violence was to militarize a provincial bureaucracy already crawling with his own Catholic cronies and protégés. Their violence alienated many southern peasants, driving them into the arms of the Viet Cong, whose violence was tightly focused. It was they, not the Diem regime, which won the hearts and minds of the rural population through a genuine understanding of their concerns and by simple but effective measures.

  The Diem regime spouted pretentious French metaphysics (shorn of the tradition of administrative efficiency) while practising corruption, torture and arbitrary murder.43 And it was into this rat-hole that the Eisenhower administration poured more than $1 billion in aid between 1955 and 1961, as much as 78 per cent of it military. Superficially, Saigon took on the countenance of a modern city – it reminded the economist John Kenneth Galbraith of Toulouse – with the added charm of exceptionally pretty girls in pyjamas riding around on bicycles. Much of the non-military US aid was frittered away on consumer goods, rather than invested in ways that might have improved the lot of Vietnam’s peasantry, who were 90 per cent of the population.

  From 1956 onwards the American MAAG took over from the French the task of training the South Vietnamese Army. Its supremo, Lieutenant-General Samuel ‘Hanging Sam’ Williams, was a conventionally minded soldier who had served in Korea. This meant that such reforms as MAAG oversaw involved preparing the South Vietnamese Army for a conventional conflict, in which the threat would be a North Vietnamese invasion. Even this aim was subverted by Diem’s interference. Loyalty trumped competence when it came to promotions, and dispositions were made that suited Diem’s political instincts. As for the local Civil Guard, disagreements broke out among the American advisers as to whether this should be a village home guard or a mobile strike force. Diem simply starved it of resources and used it as a dumping ground for officers he disliked. As the Communist insurgency gained terrifying momentum, the Americans were also divided between those civilian officials, led by Ambassador Elbridge Dubrow, who wanted Diem to reform to widen his popular support, and MAAG, which looked for a purely military solution. Ironically, an increased US presence did not translate into control over America’s client, for Diem knew how to play on US divisions, and had his own ideas on where Vietnam should stand in the wider world. He wanted to demonstrate that he was not another Chiang Kai-shek or Syngman Rhee. By 1958 forty countries had formally recognized South Vietnam, and it participated in some twenty UN-affiliated organizations. Diem hoped that his non-Communist and non-colonial country would become a leading light of the non-aligned world. Even as the Americans were pouring millions into modernizing his country, Diem’s preferred model was to be an Asian de Gaulle. There was plenty of scope for disillusionment on both sides.44

  After Lansdale had left Vietnam, he dealt deftly with how the shadowy role of men like himself was being presented to a wider public. He was not the real-life prototype for Graham Greene’s 1955 Quiet American, since Greene had finished the first draft of his novel before the two men briefly met amid a large French crowd. A more likely candidate would be the younger Howard Simpson, with whom Greene once shared a plane and jeep ride followed by a boozy lunch. Nonetheless, in the small world of Westerners in Saigon, Greene’s book was read as a novel in which actual persons and events are disguised as fictional characters. Lansdale certainly took the character of Greene’s American anti-hero Alden Pyle very personally even if, at forty-six on arrival in Saigon, he was hardly naive young Pyle idealistically blundering around in a Saigon he barely understood. Pyle vies for the love of a Vietnamese girl called Phuong with an opium-addicted, worldly-wise British correspondent called Thomas Fowler, tempted to escape his loveless marriage with an English Roman Catholic wife. Fowler realizes that Pyle is deeply involved in Cao Dai terrorism, and indirectly has him assassinated by the Viet Minh. The book snobbishly insinuates that Pyle is merely a vulgar interloper from a Coca-Cola and chewing-gum culture in a dying colonial world that was not all bad, for Greene had much fellow feeling for the supposedly sophisticated French.

  Although he could do little about the book, Lansdale strongly influenced the 1958 Hollywood movie based on it, since the producer Joseph Mankiewicz made him a technical adviser and submitted the draft script for his comments. Partly by casting the much decorated American war hero Audie Murphy in the role of Pyle, and Michael Redgrave playing Fowler like a maiden aunt in drag, Mankiewicz reversed the Greene’s own sympathies for the two protagonists. The most memorable parts of the drama are the forceful monologues of Audie Murphy’s Pyle defending the US mission in Vietnam, while Redgrave blanches with queenly horror. Lansdale also ensured that the film-makers received the full co-operation of the CIA’s Saigon station, which may explain why the movie includes vividly authentic footage of the city’s raucous street life, although the actress who played Phuong was an orientalized American starlet. The proceeds of the film’s premiere were donated to American Friends of Vietnam. Greene was furious about this travesty of his political analysis, which probably did not scratch the surface of what Lansdale and his kind really did.45

  9. SOMETIMES SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP

  ‘In God We Trust’ and ‘M
ore Bang for the Buck’

  Dwight ‘Ike’ Eisenhower was the last US President to be born in rural nineteenth-century America. The son of a failed farmer and store keeper of the Mennonite River Brethren, Eisenhower – thanks to the patronage of Army Chief of Staff George Marshall – vaulted over hundreds of more senior officers to become one of the greatest military commanders of the twentieth century.1 Stalin made one of the most astute comments about Ike, when he told Averell Harriman: ‘General Eisenhower is a very great man, not only because of his military accomplishments, but because of his human, friendly, kind and frank nature. He is not a grubi [meaning coarse or brusque] like most military.’2

  But he was still a poor boy made good and, as he approached retirement age, concern about how to ensure a comfortable living loomed larger in his mind than whether to throw his hat into the political ring. The matter of comfortable living was resolved by a coterie of rich Republican businessmen he befriended while playing golf at Augusta, Georgia. He made more cash with his wartime memoirs. A spell as president of New York’s Columbia University was a waste of his energy. Between 1951 and 1952, while he served as commander of NATO forces in Europe, Ike played the reluctant bride to Republican suitors, while quietly having experts flown over to brief him about mortgages, farm subsidies, public housing and the economy.3 He was so careful to hide his political views that in November 1951 Truman offered to back his candidacy as a Democrat – even as his rich Republican friends were organizing a Citizens for Ike movement. These friends also paid the salaries of the personal staff he retained after leaving the army, including the Democrat-supporting journalist Emmet John Hughes, seconded to his campaign teams in 1952 and 1956 and author of one of the sharpest insider memoirs of that era, The Ordeal of Power (1963).